BEYOND BUILDING BETTER CHECKLISTS: STAFF DEVELOPMENT IN A SCHOOL EXPERIENCE PROGRAMME

The article reviews the aims of the School Experience of a new B.Ed, primary degree, based on Zeichner's notion of the ‘reflective teacher’. Having established the aims, the authors then examine the implications this has for finding forms of assessment which are commensurate with the process‐orientated, formative, self‐critical nature of the degree.

The issues raised, in this article, relate to the needs of tutors in developing new roles and relationships between tutor and student, tutor and class teacher, and tutor and tutor. The resulting staff development programme — designed to support the emerging ‘reflective tutor’ — is discussed.     

Exploring the ethical issues related to visual methodology when including young children’s voice in wider research samples

ABSTRACT

Understanding and working with ethical issues when including young children in educational research is critical to ensuring their involvement is meaningful. Increasingly, different methodological approaches have been used to address some of these issues, and the use of visual methods is showing particular potential for its age appropriateness. This paper will specifically focus on three examples of drawing based visual method used with samples of children across compulsory school age from the Learning to Learn in Schools project: Pupil View Templates (n?=?263, age range 4–12 years), cartoon storyboards (n?=?210, age range 4–16 years) and fortune lines (n?=?69, 4–14 years). The discussion of each method will be framed from a pragmatic perspective and will particularly focus on the ethics of process and output, how the method was used and the data that were analysed. Questions will be asked about the considerations that need to be made when including young children in data sets with other older school-aged children and dilemmas identified: the affordances and constraints of visual approaches for all participants, the role of the visual as mediator, the role and positioning of the adult support and the impact this has on the nature of the data elicited.     

Circles in the sand: challenge and reinforcement of gender stereotypes in a literacy programme in Sudan

Participatory literacy programmes in developing countries are often seen as an important tool for women’s empowerment and equality. This articles problematises the way in which evaluation of progress towards these goals is couched in a linear trajectory, and often fails to uncover the messy reality of women’s negotiations to achieve their own aims. Drawing on an example of a literacy programme for internally displaced people in northern Sudan, the article highlights instances of potential challenge or reinforcement of gender stereotypes and how these were perceived by participants and project staff, situating it within the debate on gender, literacy and empowerment. The examples show that a more nuanced approach to evaluation of progress towards gender equality and empowerment is needed if power relations are to be truly understood and challenged. In addition, appropriate safety mechanisms must be built‐in to projects, acknowledging that women’s ‘empowerment’ may also lead to women in danger.     

Learning to be a good orthographic reader

Recent years have brought about rapid advances in our understanding of reading and how it develops, particularly in relation to the importance of alphabetic coding skills. However, much less has been known about the transition from alphabetic decoding to the rapid and automatic orthographic recognition of words, which is the hallmark of skilled reading. The purpose of this special issue is to focus specifically on orthographic processes in reading and how they are acquired. The present paper provides an overview of the special issue, drawing attention to key themes that run through the various contributions.     

Bender‐Gestalt II differential item functioning across Caucasian and African American examinees

Performance on figure copying tasks is empirically linked to the school readiness, learning, cognition, and neuropsychological functioning. These nonverbal tasks are frequently used to evaluate children from diverse backgrounds to minimize bias due to factors such as language, ethnicity, culture, or socioeconomic status on test performance. The current study examined the possible Differential Item Functioning across African American and Caucasian groups, ages 4 to 7 years, in Bender Motor Gestalt Test, Second Edition (BG‐II) visual‐motor scores. Results indicated that in general the BG‐II can be considered invariant across these ethnic groups in this age range.     

#poetryisnotdead: understanding Instagram poetry within a transliteracies framework

Adolescents are more connected to the globalised world than ever before, with an increased prevalence of social media use amongst youth. Young people are composing multimodal creative works, including digital poetry, to share with an online audience, using platforms such as Instagram. Drawing on transliteracies theory, this case study found that three main themes appeared regarding the nature of literacy practices on Instagram. Community and interactivity were important to poets, especially in regard to feedback. The platform and complementary apps, especially those used for photo editing, afforded poets agency and fostered multimodality when composing, thus highlighting the changing nature of digitised writing practices. Value was placed on the mobility and accessibility of Instagram as a mobile app, for composing and consuming digital poetry. Young people may therefore be considered innovators of multimodal writing who employ ever‐evolving technologies to engage in authentic literacy practices in digital spaces. As a result, this study suggests that the implications of Instapoetry on English pedagogy include the increased exposure and relevance of poetry writing and appreciation, a space for student‐centred writing, reading, and analysis of poems, as well as a relevant method of peer review and collaboration.